Catching up

Blog Post by: Karl Seckinger

August 9, 2012 - 11:06 AM

It’s not very often it all comes together in one person. Did nature nurture, or was the chosen one somehow exceptionally gifted. I know the one time in my life I was around him, he had it, he used it, and the other four of us, at the time, wished we did.
Where he went, where he spent his life, I can’t say, he made it a point to lose track of us. We could handle the middle, neutral, mediocre, bad, and even pathetic. Not him. We knew the less than days. He wouldn’t allow them, he couldn’t. But I missed him over the years, would have liked to talk to him once in a while.
When he stepped out of a truck, got into a boat, his persona changed. Some freakish Zen state. You ever meet anybody that tied himself to a tree on a mountain top at night, all night, for a bull elk.
He lashed himself to the tree so he wouldn’t roll down the slope. He had hunted all day running through blow downs and when the daylight ran out, he didn’t come back to camp for fresh clothes, food, or a pack sack and head back up.
He didn’t want the elk to get any more mileage on him then possible. So he slept with nothing other than his clothes of the day, no food and the next morning he tracked that bull until the bull died from one perfect shot.
Then he caped that critter and hauled in the hide, one quarter of the meat, ate some lunch and we trudged back with him to help complete the job.
We all got back well past midnight, cold crisp air, stars like silver chips with the antlers and the rest of the meat. We were exhausted and dropped into our cots. He stayed up the rest of the night boning out the meat. That bull was seven mountain miles from our camp. I thought way back then, he was nuts. I still do today.
He chased a mountain lion all by himself in New Mexico. Permit fishing in Florida, spent three weeks sheep hunting in Alaska and each one of the trips, for different reasons, the weather couldn’t have been worse. Normal guys like me, would have just called it a day, not him.
He tried being married, she filed for divorce, but because he wasn’t one to let things end bad, he never showed up for the final legal decision.
Well this week, I found out he died of a ruptured vessel in his brain last spring. He was working some kind of trawl nets in of all places, the Philippine Sea. I bet he went out doing what he wanted, and I still have to wonder, where he is. The trout whisperer